A constructive post on shadow priest talents

As a long time reader of MMO champion [first time poster] and various beta forums, I have noticed a lack of constructive feedback as to how Shadow Priests would like for their class to look and feel.

The following is my vision of what the shadow tree layout should be and any critisim or suggestions would be a valued asset as many developers have mentioned that they DO read and listen to what is being said in various forums.

The Shadow Talent Tree:

Tier 1

Spirit Tap / Improved spirit tap ~ A wonderful addition and spirit scaling change to a talent that needed a new perspective. Blackout ~ PvP stun, end of story.

Tier 2

Shadow Affinity ~ Reduces the threat generated by your Shadow HEALING and Shadow spells by 7%/14%/20% [This improves scaling for our healing agro since that is now a major part of our utility!]Improved Shadow Word: Pain ~ A 3%/6% damage upgrade to the highest DPS DoT in the game.Shadow Focus ~ The reduced +hit [3% from 10%] indicates that we are now a proper dps class and should gem accordingly. 6% reduced mana cost due to changes in VT.

Tier 3

Improved Psychic Scream ~ Fears the target in Horror for 1-2 seconds within the duration of your Psychic Scream. [This effect would be dispelable but not trinketable.]Improved Mind Blast ~ Well received 2.5sec cool down reduction on a much used spell.Mind Flay ~ Most cost effective spell we have at 9% of our base mana. Range 21-22 yards. Slows the target for 40% of their movement speed.

Tier 4

Veiled Shadows ~ Reduces all damage taken by 2%/5% when active and decreases the cool down of your fade ability by 3/6 seconds. [Now useful in PvP and AoE PvE situations]Shadow Reach ~ 10%/20% range increase on shadow spells.Shadow Weaving ~ Your shadow damage spells have a chance to increase the Shadow damage you deal by 2% for 15sec. Stacks up to 5 times.

Improved Shadow Form ~ Your fade ability now has a 100% chance to remove all movement impairing effects as well a 80% chance to resist casting time reduction while under the effects of fade. Your shadow form now has a base 20% chance to resist casting time reduction. [I believe this change will lend to a better overall feel for pvp and pve for avoiding casting time reduction and improve the value of fade.]Misery ~ Your Shadow Word: Pain, Mind Flay and Vampiric Touch spells also increase the chance for harmful spells to hit and Crit by 1%/2%/3% lasting 24 sec, and increases the damage of your Mind Blast, Mind Flay and Mind Sear spells by an amount equal to 10% of your spell power. [the crit effect would not stack with a pally's judgment effect but it would increase our use in smaller groups]

Tier 9

Psychic Suffering ~ Increases damage done to targets while under the effect of Psychic scream by 2%/5% [This gives us a mechanic in pvp and pve similar to a mages 6% increased damage to the target while they are snared]Vamperic Touch ~ Causes 850 Shadow damage over 15 sec to your target and causes up to 10 party or raid members to gain 0.25% of their maximum mana per second when you deal damage from Mind Blast or after killing a target. [this gives us the ability to put it on mobs so we can dot and run (while they die) like we currently do]Pain and Suffering ~ Your Mind Flay has a 33%/66%/100% chance to refresh the duration of your Shadow Word: Pain on the target, and reduces the damage you take from your own Shadow Word: Death by 10%/20%/30%.

Tier 10

Twisted Faith ~ Increases your spell power by 4%/8%/12%/16%/20% of your total Spirit, and the damage done by your mind flay, Mind Blast and Shadow Word Death by 2%/4%/6%/8%/10% if your target is afflicted by Shadow Word: Pain or Devouring Plague. [the increase in spell power from spirit is for better scaling because of the 50% crit mod (down from 100%.) Also the addition of Devouring Plague to the list allows more pvp viability.]

Tier 11

Dispersion ~ You disperse into pure Shadow energy, damaging all targets around you for 658 Damage over 6 seconds, reducing all damage taken by 50%. You regenerate 8% mana every second for 6 sec. Dispersion can be cast while stunned, feared. [To give this spell pve viability I removed the self silence (took away the ability to trigger it while silenced) and added a damage component. increased the mana regen so that it is BETTER than just chugging a mana pot.. (i hate the current aspect/feel it gives you while using it) and reduced the damage reduction to counterbalance the damage component and non self silence.]

Spell Changes

Shadow Word: Pain ~ a word of darkness that causes 1180 Shadow damage and has the ability to crit on every tick.

This gives us a new use for old and new talents, as well as giving us something we can think of as shiny, new, improved, different, unique. This is a aspect of current gameplay that i feel is sorely lacking in the PTR but can be easily changed around with a base addition such as this.

That's really about it... I hope someone will give me feedback and a few impressions on these suggested changes.

P.S.

If anyone has access to the WoW beta forums i would implore you to post this there to give it a higher visibility to developers. All i ask is that i get my name in the post somewhere.

Re: A constructive post on shadow priest talents

The only thing I see you do is buff a decent amount of talents seen by bolding the key words or numbers that you changed.

You put Devouring Plague as a talent, it's going to become a base spell anyways. Healing aggro is spread amongst the numbers of mobs in the area of the target affected with VE, reducing the healing aggro is hardly necessary, just use it more situationally like most people do. You cut back Focused mind to 12% instead of 15% but you made it a 2 point talent. While this is ok you went and modified Mind Melt to cap at 3% crit but for ALL spells and took the point from Focused Mind and put it here, 3 point talent. Increasing the crit damage from SWP is obnoxious, Pain and Suffering make it so you shouldn't have to cast SWP more than once a boss fight. It's the most damaging DoT in the game, they buffed it already with that talent and gave it the ability to crit... and you still want more. I don't understand what you want to change about VT =/ You buffed Twisted Faith to 20% of Spirit.. that's crazy considering the switch with Imp Inner Fire being moved to Tier 2 in the discipline tree. Dispersion is meant to be a mana regen for PvE and essentially a Pain Suppression for PvP. You turned it into a Living Bomb that regens mana and takes half damage so when combined with Mind Sear that would make Priests a top AoE if not the best. I don't like it.

Overall, I don't like any of these ideas in the aspect of balance. Mind you I raid shadow =/

edit: Noticed you changed Veiled Shadows, that's just stupid, 5% damage reduction is nigh insignifcant but the 2 minute reduction on a 5 minute CD is highly significant if you blow through mana fast. Also noticed the 50% cut you made in Shadow Power, I'm not sure how much this would affect anything but I still disagree with putting SWP in there.

Re: A constructive post on shadow priest talents

All classes are supposed to be on that 2500 benchmark. Currently we are 13-14th in 25 man raids... on many damage meters. If your hybrid class is falling back like our hybrid class... then you complain like we are. Do not complain to us about your damage.

Re: A constructive post on shadow priest talents

How about you having actually played on beta before "constructing" what shadow priests should be?

Your changes do not address the 30% DPS gap that shadow is seeing between other classes.

I believe the increase in base damage from imp. inner fire [now in t2] and the added scaling of spirit with 20% base damage instead of 10% [making it a more valued stat since spirit is 1/2 the value of int in a raiding situation according to shadowpriest.com] on top of that the increased damage from shadow word: pain would address much of that difference.

Also you're correct, i do not have access to the beta and am basing a lot off of my ptr experience.

The only thing I see you do is buff a decent amount of talents seen by bolding the key words or numbers that you changed.

You put Devouring Plague as a talent, it's going to become a base spell anyways. Healing aggro is spread amongst the numbers of mobs in the area of the target affected with VE, reducing the healing aggro is hardly necessary, just use it more situationally like most people do. You cut back Focused mind to 12% instead of 15% but you made it a 2 point talent. While this is ok you went and modified Mind Melt to cap at 3% crit but for ALL spells and took the point from Focused Mind and put it here, 3 point talent. Increasing the crit damage from SWP is obnoxious, Pain and Suffering make it so you shouldn't have to cast SWP more than once a boss fight. It's the most damaging DoT in the game, they buffed it already with that talent and gave it the ability to crit... and you still want more. I don't understand what you want to change about VT =/ You buffed Twisted Faith to 20% of Spirit.. that's crazy considering the switch with Imp Inner Fire being moved to Tier 2 in the discipline tree. Dispersion is meant to be a mana regen for PvE and essentially a Pain Suppression for PvP. You turned it into a Living Bomb that regens mana and takes half damage so when combined with Mind Sear that would make Priests a top AoE if not the best. I don't like it.

Overall, I don't like any of these ideas in the aspect of balance. Mind you I raid shadow =/

A few points.

1. Yeah.. i used the Bold tag a bit too much there. sorry.
2. When raiding kara on the PTR I noticed any kind of rotation/ priority list i had was ruined if i wanted to add devouring plague for added dps to that rotation as a shadow spell and change the feeling of casting a spell that previously was just a way to bump your agro up to insane levels in raiding. Also the current aspect that shadow priests seem to hit on as a utility/dps class is giving your party back hp. I want that to be a usefull function of what we do.
3. Veiled Shadows adds bloat to specing for pve, i want to be able to delve farther down into disc without getting a talent that requires me to base my regen on a pet.
4. I went over the top with Dispersion since I hate it's current incarnation.
5. I like being a class that is more top heavy with spell power than crit. it makes me more viable in pvp due to resiliance, and at the same time gives my dot's more value.

Re: A constructive post on shadow priest talents

And I hear the mages flamig the beta forums. There are even mages complaining about a large number of classes beating them in DPS. I just wondered if Blizz introduced some additional classes :P

A mage who is complaining about his live dmg, fells in the category l2p. Certainly they can't beat warlocks, but they can beat every other class with a bit of skill and theorycrafting. Most of them ignore that they scale best with haste, better than warlocks...

And for this thread, I won't post that on beta forums sry. There are some good ideas but most of it isn't worth talking about.

1. Please forget about Sw:P being able to crit, thats just non-sense and there is no need for it. Let it do his dmg and forget about crits.
2. There isn't any kind of real improvement on your build, some small changes only. And we need a re-evaluation of the entire thing.
3. One positive point although, you noticed the additional nerfs a lot of poeple aren't aware of:
So for the 100% crit bonus, we sacrificed 6% crit on MB and MF and 10!% on Sw, you want to change it to 50%, no thanks, (again forget about Sw:P)

What we need is a Mind Melt change indead: We need +5% crit on all spells Sw included! and the talent would be ok.
Twisted faith is basically ok now, can live wwith it
Devouring pplaque will be debugged soon (100% of the dmg received as heal)
Misery is also ok as it is

4. Dispersion. At this point, I'd like to remember you, that every class has a PVE and PVP use talent. For PVE this talent is still pure crap, it was ok wenn it regenerated heal also, because it could have been useful in a lot of situations with AOE dmg, and it would have been some kind of a rescue buttom during bossfights. Not awesome but ok. Removing the heal effect made it useless for PVE. It's still a little emergency buttom, but when silenced it isn't rescuing you for sure, you can die even with 90% dmg reduction in 6 sec. (Archimonde is a good example)
And after all, spendingg a point iin it for some special situations or encounters, hm...
There was one build which added a damage effect on it, I preferred that version. Every class now has such an ability (exept us). Maybe it was a bit OP, but they could have changed it to a 10% dmg buff f.a.

Then it would be a talent of some PVE utility.

Actually on Beta the DPS of our class is really low. As I said already in other posts, I testet it with my lvl 70 priest on beta to compare with the live version. Adding all the new stuff and talents, my has dmg increased by something between 5-10% maximum. It gets better after lvl 71, because we get the new inner fire, but finally our lvl 80 DPS isn't awesome atm, believe me, when I get the time, I'll ad some WWS records of unbuffed DPS in here, but I've a lot to do a for the university, so forgive me if it takes a bit longer

Re: A constructive post on shadow priest talents

Originally Posted by Sonic018

A mage who is complaining about his live dmg, fells in the category l2p. Certainly they can't beat warlocks, but they can beat every other class with a bit of skill and theorycrafting. Most of them ignore that they scale best with haste, better than warlocks...

Hunters? Glaive rogues?

Mages do not beat those two with regularity - heck warlocks don't necessarily either.